As in past years, the ingredients remain: intense preparation, new venture showcases, adrenalin-fueled presentations through the 60-Second Elevator Pitches, First, Semi-Final, Challenge and Final competitive rounds, banquet settings, a social night soiree and the anticipation of finding out the year’s top winners at the closing gala dinner. And yet, each year is distinctly special, because each brings with it a different combination of individual personalities, and a new crop of proposed ventures, the caliber of which keeps growing from one competition to the next.

This year’s Competition kicked off with an engaging Forum on B2E’ntrepreneurship – Innovations in Corporate Entrepreneurship headlined by three guest speakers at the forefront of entrepreneurship within their organizations: Dennis Melka, co-founder of Tune Ventures.com and director of the Tune Hotels brand, a recently-launched hotel subsidiary under Air Asia; Anthony Hobrow, Group CEO of Whittington Insurance, an international insurance investment and service business based in Singapore, and Mark Hemstedt, Managing Director, The Works Partnership, a training consultancy focused on corporate team transformation, coaching and leadership. From this wealth of experience, the lessons to take home were many. Each speaker related his personal, on-going experiences with corporate entrepreneurship before opening the floor to questions from the audience, comprising graduate students and members of the regional business and academic communities.

Part of what makes the Competition exciting is that there is no way to anticipate which team will come out on top. Here, the Thammasat Asia Moot Corp judges – all leading professionals and top business players in their daily lives – played a decisive role. By the afternoon of the first day, 8 of the 16 teams were selected to enter the Semi-final round. Within a few hours after that, we were left with 4 finalists whose business plans were deemed most feasible in the eyes of potential investors.
With each successive round the stakes got higher and the questioning tougher. The judges took nothing for granted. In the final round, teams encountered many potential deal-breakers in the form of such questions as: Does your product really warrant a patent? What makes it so special? Can it be duplicated? Would consumers care to use it at all? Are your projected revenues realistic? What happens if you can’t get certain players to cooperate as you would wish? Clearly, the judges wanted each team to understand potential investor concerns and to be able to question the most basic assumptions underlying their business plans.

On the night of day two, students, judges and guests were treated to a social night soiree held at The Residence, Grand Hyatt Erawan Bangkok. Presented with a spa theme, hotel masseuses giving neck and shoulder massages offered participants a chance to unwind and relax between competitive rounds. The following afternoon, the finalists’ 45-minute, fully interactive presentations took place in the Grand Ballroom, and were well-attended by invited guests and interested persons. At the closing ceremony and gala dinner later that evening, 20 awards were announced and presented, from the divisional Best Presentation and Best Business Plan honors, to the SET and mai Challenge Round winners, and the event’s largest cash prize of USD 12,500 for the year’s top winners, bringing another engaging and successful Competition to a close.